In today's open source roundup: DuckDuckGo may eventually give Google a run for its money. Plus: A screenshot tour of Peppermint Five, and helpful tools for new Linux engineers

ITworld|July 2, 2014

Ever since the NSA spying scandal became public, more and more people have worried that their searches might be tracked by the government. This has led some folks to abandon Google and move to DuckDuckGo, which doesn't track or filter bubble you when you do a search.

Is DuckDuckGo the next big thing in search engines? Higher Visibility thinks that DuckDuckGo is worth paying attention to as privacy becomes more and more important to users everywhere.

For those who are unfamiliar, DuckDuckGo is said to be a completely secure and private search engine. This means that the search engine doesn’t track you or collect any IP addresses, which means there is no filtering and everyone sees the same results all the time for any give search query.

DuckDuckGo saw a 50 percent traffic increase just 8 days after the PRISM program scandal, which showed that NSA was regularly tracking searches on major search engines like Google. However, Search Engine Land reminds us here that this huge jump isn’t so huge when you think about a jump to 4 million searches per day while Google was seeing more than 1 billion.

I'm a huge fan of DuckDuckGo, it's been my default search engine for a while now and it just keeps getting better and better. I can't imagine using Google unless I absolutely had to but thankfully that is the exception and not the rule these days. Sorry Google but I prefer to keep my searches private and I have no interest in being filter bubbled either.

I think Apple made a very wise decision by adding DuckDuckGo as a search engine option in iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite. It fits into Apple's larger strategy of trying to protect the privacy of its users, and I think it's just a matter of time until Google is no longer Apple's default search engine. When that change happens it will be a huge blow to Google, which makes quite a bit of money from iOS searches.

Some would say (and I tend to agree) that DuckDuckGo is really the future of search engines, and Google is stuck in the past. DuckDuckGo is already offering what more and more users will crave in the years ahead - private search results - and this is something that Google will never be able to replicate since its search business is so heavily tied into its advertising revenue and other services.

I've been recommending DuckDuckGo for a while now to family and friends. If you haven't tried it then head over to DuckDuckGo.com and give it a shot. If you still feel that you need Google then just remember that when the time comes to search for something that you want kept private, DuckDuckGo will always be there for you.